Kim Il-sung: From Christian to Dictator
Written by Casper van der Veen
Pyongyang was once known as the “Jerusalem of the East,” because so many of its residents came to the Gospel through the Western missionaries active there. The Christian faith flourished until North Korea turned communist in the 1940s and adopted a strictly anti-religious course. Since then, North Korea has topped Open Doors’ World Watch List of Christian persecution for more than 20 years running. The contrast could hardly be starker, says historian and journalist Jonathan Cheng in conversation with evangelisch.de.
The person who apparently set this organized persecution of Christians in motion — North Korea’s first dictator, Kim Il-sung (1912–1994) — had himself grown up as a Christian in a devout Presbyterian family in the “Jerusalem of the East.” “In many of the books I’ve read about North Korea, that’s mentioned in a single sentence, at most a paragraph, before immediately moving on to his time as a guerrilla fighter in the 1930s,” says historian and journalist Jonathan Cheng, 43. “For me, having been raised Christian, I felt there was more to say about it, so I set out to find information myself.”
We speak with Cheng over Zoom from New York, where he’s presenting his 768-page book, Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult. What began as just an article eventually became this book, on which Cheng worked for a full twelve years. During that time he served as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, first in South Korea and later in China, where he is currently based.
The monograph doesn’t begin with Kim, but with the American missionary Samuel Moffett (1864–1939), who arrived in Korea in 1890 on his 26th birthday to spread the Word of God. Unlike many other foreign evangelists, he didn’t settle in the capital, Seoul, but in Pyongyang, in the socially, politically, and economically marginalized north. “At the time it was a rough and notorious city, known for its bars, drunkenness, violence, and things of that sort,” says Cheng. “Known” is relative, since at the time Westerners knew very little about Korea, let alone Pyongyang. “Within a few years of Moffett’s arrival, a city with that reputation transformed into the Jerusalem of the East.”
The early years were difficult for Moffett, but eventually the North Koreans proved receptive to the Gospel. The churches filled with new believers, and Moffett complained in letters back to the United States that he never had a moment’s peace, since curious Koreans were constantly knocking on his door. Cheng describes a great revival movement in Pyongyang in 1907, during which, at an evening service in the Presbyterian church, hundreds of Koreans came forward to confess their sins amid great weeping and overwhelming emotion. This repeated itself several times over the following weeks. Western missionaries such as Graham Lee, James Scarth Gale, William L. Swallen, and William Blair described these events as something they had never witnessed before.
How the faith took root in North Korea
“Samuel Moffett and other missionaries would first have pointed to the Lord to explain why so many Koreans found faith so quickly,” says Cheng. “But I believe Moffett’s character played an important role in how Korean Protestantism would develop. He was very devout and uncompromising on doctrine. In his conversations on the ground, he showed himself to be an empathetic, kind, and curious person, open to others. We see this same dynamic later in the Korean churches as well.”
How the faith took root in North Korea can be seen in the Korean pastors with whom Moffett and other foreign missionaries worked. One striking figure in the book is Kil Son-ju, a nearly blind pastor who studied the Bible so often and so thoroughly that he could recite entire books from memory. “The Western missionaries kept saying they had come to bring the Gospel to Korea,” says Cheng. “But that requires not just missionaries, but also Koreans who take part in it.”
Kil Son-ju also became involved in the Korean independence movement and even ended up in prison in 1919 for signing a declaration of independence. “He and other clergy were deeply engaged and active in their faith, but they didn’t stay out of the political circumstances of their time,” says Cheng. In the interwar period, Christians played a major role in the Korean independence movement.
Flight to China
Kim Il-sung, born in 1912, spent his childhood in those years in a village near Pyongyang, two years after Korea had been colonized by Japan. His mother, Kang Pan-sok — whose name means “rock,” an allusion to Peter — was a so-called “Bible woman,” one of the women who worked alongside missionaries in Korea to spread the Gospel. His father, Kim Hyong-jik, studied at a mission school and was very active in the church. He too was involved in the Korean independence movement.
As a child, Kim Il-sung attended a Presbyterian church, where, according to sources Cheng found, he played the organ, helped with services, and even taught Sunday school. In 1919 the family fled to China, since Korea was no longer safe due to his father’s activism. In China, Kim Il-sung continued to have contact with Korean pastors and Christians, but before long he also came into contact with nationalist and communist movements. Whether Kim Il-sung was ever truly a believing Christian remains unclear, Cheng says. “He was, first and foremost, a nationalist who hated the Japanese occupiers. If he was ever a Christian at all, he certainly wasn’t one anymore in his twenties and thirties.” Kim was just 33 years old when he arrived in North Korea in 1945 to take up a leading role, on behalf of the Soviet Union, in the now-communist country.
Comparison with a cult
Cheng argues that Kim’s Christian youth played a role in the personality cult he built up around himself. “When I first visited North Korea, I was struck by how religious everything felt: the rituals, the bowing before statues of the leaders, the omnipresent image of Kim Il-sung,” says Cheng. In his book he also quotes former US President Jimmy Carter, who visited North Korea for the first time in 1994 and compared the system to a cult.
Isn’t this glorification of Kim simply copied from the Soviet dictator Stalin, who likewise built up a great personality cult around himself and, despite his own Christian background, persecuted Christians en masse? “Kim Il-sung and his personality cult were a product of all his influences,” says Cheng. “He grew up with a mixture of Confucianism, Japanese emperor-worship, communism, nationalism, and Protestant Christianity. The latter isn’t the only ingredient in the mix, but it plays a major role.”
Redeemer of the Korean people?
Cheng’s book is titled Korean Messiah because Kim Il-sung consistently portrayed himself as the redeemer of the Korean people. “He saw in Christianity a model for gaining power and building a state,” says Cheng. “He filtered out the message from it.” Kim arrogated to himself the position of God or Jesus, even as he attacked Christianity itself.
The persecution of North Korean Christians began as early as the late 1940s. Many of them fled to South Korea at the time, where they founded Christian communities that would go on to grow substantially. As an example, Cheng cites Kyung-Chik Han, who, together with other North Korean Christians who had fled the communists, founded the Youngnak Presbyterian Church in Seoul. This congregation grew to 500 sister churches with more than 60,000 members, for which Han received the Templeton Prize in 1992.
“Only someone who grew up as a churchgoing Christian and understands faith in that way can recognize the potential power of belief,” says Cheng. “It’s precisely because Kim Il-sung understood that power that he worked so hard to undermine it — because he recognized how much it could threaten his position of power. This is still evident today in the state’s intensive efforts to prevent the spread of Christianity. Refugees sent back from China to North Korea are first asked whether they had contact with Christians there.”
Kim Il-sung died in 1994 at the age of 82, but in the years before his death the dictator underwent a change. In 1988/89 he had two Protestant churches (re)built, as well as a Catholic cathedral. In 1992 he invited the American preacher Billy Graham to North Korea, and several South Korean pastors visited the communist country as well. During these visits, Kim spoke openly about the Christian faith and the Bible. With some Christian friends from his youth, whom he had left North Korea before and whom he now had brought to Pyongyang, he even sang Christian songs from his childhood. “I find that fascinating,” says Cheng. “What moved him to do that, we unfortunately can no longer determine. I suspect it expresses a nostalgia for his younger years.”
Today, the third generation of the Kim dynasty rules North Korea, and Christians have been persecuted even more severely in recent years, even as the number of North Koreans coming into contact with the Bible is also increasing. Still, Cheng does not rule out that Pyongyang might one day become the Jerusalem of the East again. “The Christian message has already changed Korea and Pyongyang once before. It can do so again.”